Rahnové
—ASHáN
The weight of months I’ll never get back holds me down like a collapsing tomb. The wail of a newborn I never got to hold, two tiny eyes the color of my own shadow blinking up at me.
You left us in the dark. My daughter’s first words, in my voice, are an accusation I will carry until the universe burns out.
Every second in the void is an eternity of grief. I’m forced to watch this play out with no way to escape.
Eden has moved on, cradling a life I was stolen from because of that drávh dust. (Damned) Will she even tell Vaelína about me? That she has another father?
You left us in the dark.
It loops over and over, gnawing at my sanity, tearing my soul to ribbons until there is nothing left of me but the freezing, howling wind of my own failure. I am drowning in it.
The dark fractures and a blinding surge of golden light flows over the void. My eye snaps open, and the warm spring daylight of the meadow drains from the sky, replaced by darkness and a swollen moon.
The temperature plummets. My breath plumes in a thick white cloud as I gasp for air. A thin, crackling sheet of frost creeps over the colorful petals around me, freezing them mid-bloom.
I am so disoriented that my mind still feels like it’s trapped in the agonizing horror of the void.
“Eden!” I rasp, my wing snapping outward, fingers clawing at the frost until they collide with warm, bare skin.
My fingers wrap around her shoulders, dragging her small body against my chest. I shove my face into the crook of her neck, inhaling her scent like a dying man.
My hands scramble over her, clutching her jaw, her hair, the curve of her waist, desperate to confirm she’s real and this isn’t a trick.
My hand smooths over her stomach. There’s barely a swell. She’s still pregnant—still carrying our daughter.
It was just a nightmare.
A sob slips out of me, and the frantic strength from earlier drains from my muscles all at once.
I collapse over her, a sliver of my shadow wrapping around her belly, reaching for the tiny spark I was so certain I lost. Vaelína answers my darkness the way she always has, enveloping it without an ounce of fear.
I didn’t miss it. I didn’t miss her.
“You’re here,” I rasp, my voice still raw from screaming in the void. I pull back enough to stare at Eden’s face, my hands refusing to stop where they frantically move over her.
“How long? How long was I under, ash’kaela?”
Her head lolls against my shoulder, her breathing slow and even.
“Ash’kaela,” I murmur, gathering her carefully into my lap, cradling her against my chest where the cold can’t chill her. A shadow-tendril sweeps beneath us, lifting her off the frostbitten clover. “Eden. Come back to me. I need to see your eyes.”
I brush my knuckles along her cheek, my skelva absurdly gentle. She turns instinctively into the warmth.
“That’s it,” I breathe. “There you are. Wake up.”
Her lashes flutter a few times before she opens them; the same pale green eyes I watched in my memories every second I was gone find mine.
She blinks up at me, her gaze drifting sleepily over my face. The instant she registers I’m back, her breath catches.
“Ashán?” she whispers.
Her face crumples, tears spilling down her face. She wraps both of her small arms around my neck.
“You’re back,” she chokes. “You finally came back.”
I crush her against me, a tendril of shadow winding up her spine to anchor her there.
“I’m here, angel,” I murmur into her hair. “I’m not going anywhere. I have you—”
I breathe her in. Beneath the peony, honey and the sweet bloom of our daughter—I smell Sage. Rain and cucumber, woven into her skin and the slick still cooling on her thighs. He’s all over her. He’s in her.
A growl builds in my chest, frost spidering across my ribs.
I went into the dark, and the world kept turning without me. She was claimed—and I wasn’t there. I felt none of it. I have days of nothing, and he has this, the scent of her soaked all the way through. The nightmare rears its ugly head: replaced. You were gone, and you were not missed.
“Ashán.” Eden pulls back, her eyes wet. “What’s wrong? Aren’t you happy to be home?”
“He had you.” My skelva flex against her back. My eyes linger on the marks down her throat and chest. “While I was buried, screaming for you—he had you. All of you.”
Her eyes widen. She reaches up, her warm hands framing my jaw.
“Ashán, look at me.” Her voice softens. “He didn’t take anything from you.”
“He’s all over you, Eden.” Fire licks at the back of my throat as my wing flares wide. “I smell him, and I smell what you gave him while I was rotting in the dark.”
“I was saving his life!” she cries out, new tears spilling down her face. “He was wilting, Ashán. And this was the only way to save you both.”
The growl falters in my chest.
“You weren’t able to come back on your own.
” Her thumb strokes the seam where my bone meets his flesh.
“The níva was draining Sage’s lifeforce, and it was dragging you down with it.
I didn’t even know why he was sick until Therael came.
The only way to close the loop, to ground the excess of magic…
was that.” Her breath hitches. “And do you know why?”
She sniffles and drops her hands from my face. I catch them and guide them back to where they held me.
“Sage and I were finally having a moment after you left, and then I saw a piece of your shadow in the mirror, and I completely neglected him to search for you—I always look for you, Ashán.”
Another tear slips down her face, and my heart cracks.
The jealousy, the frost, all of it dies in an instant.
No. Not this. Anything but this. The last time she cried, it sent me slithering into a grave I dug myself for over a week. Days of nothing but emptiness because I couldn’t bear to be the thing that hurt her.
“No, no, no—don’t,” I rasp, my pointed fingertips catching her tears before they can fall. “Don’t cry. Please. I can’t—ash’kaela, I can’t bear it when you cry. I’ll take it back, all of it. I’m not angry. I was never angry, just—please stop crying.”
A shadow tendril cups her jaw. Another wipes her eyes.
“I’m sorry,” I breathe. “I’m here. I’m not going anywhere. Just don’t cry. I’ll do anything.”
“You won’t leave again?” she whispers.
“Never,” I vow. “I swear it on our daughter. I will never leave you behind again.”
She melts into me, her bare skin pressing against the cold plane of my chest.
“I missed you,” she whispers. “Ten days you were gone, Ashán. I talked to you every single night, even though I wasn’t sure you could hear me.”
“I heard you. Every word until the dream dust.”
“I missed the way you touch me,” she rasps, her hips squirming over my shadow.
The smoky tendril answers her, thickening beneath her, curling to cradle the shifting weight of her hips.
A shudder rolls through me as her slick warmth soaks into it.
I can feel how much she’s aching already.
It’s the strangest, most maddening thing to be the darkness she’s writhing on and to feel it as though her body is moving directly against the most sensitive part of me.
“Careful, ash’kaela,” I rasp, my skelva sliding from her lower back to rest over the crease of her thighs. “Ten days of starvation… and my mind is full of nothing but depravity and you.”
“What kind of depravity, rahnové?”
A dark smile curves my half of our mouth, fangs gleaming in the moonlight. The shadow beneath her tightens, dragging her hips against my vék. Her gasp ripples straight through my spine. “Have you been learning Luvárun while I was away?”
“Hm?” She blinks slowly. “I didn’t learn anything I just felt it. What does it mean?”
She didn’t study our language. Her soul chose it.
I’ve spent the last two days convinced I had been erased, and now the name of what I am is falling from the only lips I’ve ever wanted.
“Rahnové,” I rasp, shadow pulsing once in an involuntary flex. “Means my dark prince.”
“You are my dark prince, Ashán,” she whispers, caressing the vorí of my chest.
The whole world recoils from my bones, but she strokes them like they’re precious.
Grief, relief, and ten days of starvation collapse into a single, ravenous point. My shadow erupts, coiling up her wrists, winding around her throat, and sliding between her thighs all at once until she’s caged in me from every direction. Frost spreads in a wide ring across the clover.
“Then let your dark prince make up for lost time.” I purr against her jaw. “I want to take my time with you, ash’kaela.”
The tendril between her legs thins until it’s only a whisper of dark silk, brushing over her aching center.
Her head falls backward, copper hair spilling onto my shadow.
“Look at me, mí’maru.”
Her heavy eyelids lift. She tries raising her hips, but my shadow holds her just out of reach. A frustrated whine escapes her lips.
“Ashán… please.”
“Please?” I repeat the word against her throat, my shadow stilling entirely. “Tell me what you felt when I was gone,” I rasp, my fangs catching on her earlobe. “Tell me how much you missed the dark, Eden, and maybe I’ll give you what you want.”
“I missed you every night, Ash. Please just touch me.”
“Not yet, angel. I haven’t told you yet, but I was stuck watching a phantom timeline the last two days I was under.
” A tendril of smoke creeps upward, finding the swell of her breast, circling the peak just enough to make her nipples harden.
“In that timeline, I couldn’t lay a finger on you.
You moved on with Sage, and I missed the birth of our daughter. ”
Her body goes rigid on top of me, the haze of arousal replaced with pure heartbreak.
“Ashán… no,” she whispers. “That would never happen.”
She tries to wrench her wrists free from my binds.
“Don’t,” I breathe. My shadow tightens around her wrists, refusing to release her. “Don’t pull away from me. Not when I can finally feel you again.”
I pull her down until her forehead meets mine.